Cliff Grant has joined The Story Companies, bicoastal and Chicago, as executive producer. He is experienced in both commercials and episodic television. Grant most recently served for two years as line producer on the NBC reality series Starting Over.
At The Story Companies, Grant will work with the shop’s spot directors and be involved in its national sales push. He will also help to recruit new directorial talent. Grant is based in Chicago.
Grant’s move represents a homecoming–both to the studio and to commercials. Early in his career, he served as production manager at The Story Companies. Grant went on to several spot industry roosts, having been a staff producer at Manarchy Films, Chicago, then being partnered in his own company, and next working as a producer on jobs for such shops as Crossroads, bicoastal and Chicago, bicoastal/international MJZ, and bicoastal Moxie Pictures (which recently opened a London office).
Grant is currently producing several projects for The Story Companies, including campaigns for Mississippi Gulf Coast Tourism, directed by David Orr, and Lowe’s, helmed by Laurie Rubin.
A Chicago native, Grant graduated from Columbia University with a film degree. He came up through the ranks working as a production assistant on spot and feature film shoots. He then landed his first staff post with The Story Companies.Review: Writer-Director Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”
"Is it too real for ya?" blares in the background of Andrea Arnold's latest film, "Bird," a 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) rides with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), on his electric scooter past scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The song's question — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for "Bird." Arnold's films ( "American Honey," "Fish Tank") are rigorous in their gritty naturalism. Her fiction films — this is her first in eight years — tend toward bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world locations. Her last film, "Cow," documented a mother cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing souls, human and otherwise, in soulless environments. A dream of something more is tantalizing just out of reach. In "American Honey," peace comes to Star (Sasha Lane) only when she submerges underwater.
In "Bird," though, this sense of otherworldly possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey awakens in a field where she encounters a strange figure in a skirt ( Franz Rogowski ) who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His name, he says, is Bird. He has a soft sweetness that doesn't otherwise exist in Bailey's hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She's skeptical of him at first, but he keeps lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck now and again like he's watching out for Bailey. And he does watch out for her, helping Bailey through a hard coming of age: the abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) of her mother (Jasmine Jobson); her half brother (Jason Buda) slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has... Read More